transmediale 2014: afterglow - The Digicult report

If you missed transmediale, festival for art and digital culture in Berlin, this is the chance to go back there to 'see' what happened. Commissioned works, performances, conferences, talks, and an Internet black market have spiced up afterglow, the 27th transmediale that has taken place between 29.01 and 02.02 as usual at Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin. Under the multiple meanings of the afterglow, and slogans such as “How do you feel today?” “Feel Healthy, Feel Fit”, the debate has rotated around the different approaches towards e-waste, cloud computing, surveillance, mining, big data, and whistle-blowers.

This plastic representation recalls accidentally two different approaches, which have structured the 27th transmediale core concept, the “afterglow”. The artistic director Kristoffer Gansing together with Tatiana Bazzichelli (conference programme curator) and Marcel Schwierin (screening programme curator) have namely given prominence to the strategies put into action by artists, journalists, hacktivists and critics exploiting, revaluating and revitalizing the digital and physical waste produced during the heyday of digital high-tech evolution. It’s neither possible nor interesting to comprise all the very different approaches presented during the 5-days programme into two closed and unconnected categories.